I primarily use Gnome desktop (x11) with Ubuntu because I’m pretty comfortable with it, I like the minimalist, modern style, I enjoy the smoothness, and I don’t feel like I need to customize everything. Plus, having familiarity with the desktop, out-of-box experience helps me when installing and reinstalling, which I do often because of work.

The issue with it, however, is I can’t really play games smoothly on it, specifically Rocket League. On Plasma, I was able to achieve smoothness (not just high framerate, but also input – erm, latency? lag? not sure the term here) by installing the liquorix kernel, using the proprietary nvidia drivers, and – here is the key – hitting Shift+Alt+F12 to disable with the compositor. After that, I get a nice smooth experience in Rocket League, which is essential since it’s a game that is dependent on quick reactions and physics.

But with Gnome, there is no disabling the compositor this way. Supposedly Gnome handles this by allowing apps to bypass the compositor if they’re in fullscreen mode, but it does not seem that Rocket League does this. I did set it to full screen, turned off the second monitor, but it still felt like there was a delay between when I pressed a button on the controller and when the car reacted. The framerate is still at 144, but its not playable with this amount of input lag. Honestly, feels kinda like if vsync were on. I did read that mutter forces vsync on, but not sure how reliable that is.

I don’t mind logging out and switching my desktop to Plasma, but it would be nice if I could just stick with Gnome. I very much like how it handles workspaces, and yeah, I know I could probably configure Plasma to do somewhat of the same thing, but it just doesn’t feel the same to me.

Anyone have RL running smoothly on Gnome?

Edit: whoops, yes, running through proton. I forget what version at the moment…